Quarter Notes

After writing to a friend that I was spending a weekend in Brittany she replied “Enjoy London”

How curious that the two places – ‘Brittany’ and ‘Britain’ are far more than a narrow stretch of water apart.

What we are eating here lives around the same shores but somehow England has retreated from the beaches and only a few fish fingers grace the family tables.

The harbor is right by the fishmonger and the plateau was waiting for us to collect this morning

Simple pleasures of slow food weekend

Our school has long celebrated literacy in general and journalism in particular. One of the great upper school teachers, Cherry Cook, left behind an artifact that has been a symbol of writing for the school. This Linotype type-setting machine was the last of its kind to grace the print shop of the Paris Herald Tribune. Relocated at the American School of Paris, it has become the first object to meet the eye from the buses than roll into the parking lot with their daily delivery of fresh minds. Now its days are numbered unless people can be convinced it is worth keeping. Already hated by Marxists two centuries ago it is now suspected of presenting another danger, though to date nobody has been hurt by its presence.

Next week we begin rehearsals with the O.K. Chorale so right now I’m
enjoying the last few lunch hours of freedom. What better place to
enjoy them than out on the playground during recess?
From a brief set of observations with a little time to take some
telephoto shots of the action while dodging the flying balls, here is
what I learned:

1. Everyone moves, fast and often. Getting a camera shot is
   like catching hummingbirds.
2. Children use the available tools and master their multiple
   applications.
3. Personnel management is by need – every game is a tight set
   of ad-hoc teams.
4. People smile more than in the classroom.
5. People learn more than when they are still.
6. Recess creates undefined open spaces and lots of sounds.

I wish I could publish all the faces I took back from these precious
moments. They tell volumes and it’s like seeing into their hearts when
the public mask has dropped away. Still body language says plenty and
these arrested motions show how all is movement, change, surprise.

This posting on the BBC speaks for itself, or would if only it could:

This is a really quick post – where initially the big buzz in schools was “Wash your hands while singing ‘Happy Birthday to you’ twice over” suddenly this has been replaced by ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ (much shorter with great optional verses about what happens to your teacher) and now:

3. Wash your hands often and long.

Like seasonal flu, swine flu spreads through the coughs and sneezes of people who are sick. Emphasize to children that they should wash with soap and water long enough to finish singing the alphabet song, “Now I know my ABC’s…” Also use alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

Good choice – this way you can both disinfect your hands (great against germs of course but totally ineffective against a virus) AND learn some basic skills. Think of all the reading, math, biology, history and science embedded in those traditional songs. Think of the amount of soap that can be used to recycle goats, fish and trees

What happened to Happy Birthday? Probably struck off the list, as washing in public could be considered a performance so anyone celebrating those lyrics under copyright until 2030 had better get ready to pay the piper.

Down at the bottom of the great list:

“Cough into your elbow or shoulder.”

Well that’s quite a challenge, especially number two. Rather like sticking your toe in your ear, it certainly needs practice.

Still, when all the rules are spelled out, how much can we really control? The keyboard I’m touching right now is probably a zoological dream for species development. Perhaps I shouldn’t type.

As I greet the cleaning crew at school (I’m weird, I think they are among the most important pillars of our society) there is a choice between a wave, a handshake or even a hug. For the lawyers among us, this happens after the children have left school. Forget it, I’m on the side of the huggers.

So far we have been told to stay away from undercooked meat, raw eggs, flying pigs and now other human beings. This will be a difficult path to navigate. When people start to fall sick we look for a reason, then a big plan. When I was a young teen we had to consider how to build our fall-out shelters in three minutes with brown paper. I guess what I learned had a rather short shelf life.

Having said all that, I’m delighted our community is preparing alternate learning structures, whether it be online or in little packages to take home. Sometimes the true solution comes from doing things differently.

Oh, and if you have a birthday this week I’ll let you choose between Row Your Boat and ABC – we won’t use candles in case it sends germs as you blow them out. Today a child passed me a little piece of almond cake, hand made and handled. It was delicious.

Reflecting on the first few days of school is rather like trying to see yourself in a rainstorm hitting a millpond. What used to be calm is somewhere between in-motion and churning. All we set up to look so pretty without humans is now put to the stress test and me(n)tal fatigue. Well not really as the small but sharp minds are taking it all in, putting some of it away in personal folders of the brain. Others are leaping out in true sky diving mode in case there are limited places for Icarians in our school. Actually Icarians are nothing about that story of flying too close to the sun, they were a group of utopians who went to America and founded some early communes that Karl Marx would have been proud of.

What I meant to say is that the students are glad to be back, mostly safe in our regular procedures and occasionally defying some of the laws of gravity. As usual.

What does it mean to be a teacher in the new world of unlimited information? Some of what we do is what we know, or knew, or what people who used to know taught the people we were.

If our learning was clothing we’d be having some difficult choices. Keep wearing the same old apparel day and night, without washing or pressing it – or try on some new styles that we might be comfortable stepping out in. What used to be off-the-peg wisdom is now tailored (differentiated) to each learner and easy to try on, adjust ourselves and wear as we please. It also has the novelty that for the most part it’s entirely free. Why is it that so many of our colleagues get uncomfortable in a fresh outfit and snuggle back into those old rags that go back centuries?

After years of being cajoled it looks as though we are about to get going with Google Apps for Education – limitless opportunities for developing curricula with strong curricular emphasis. Just like this incredible WordPress universe, the surface of which I’ m barely starting to tickle, let alone scratch. The Web 2.0 is a great tool and also a great teacher.

Let’s log into Google Mail and catch up on some of those cool connected apps that make it all so simple to connect, share and develop!

Isn’t that cool? I can’t wait to try again, as I have for the last fifteen minutes… Google should be ashamed, as should Microsoft, Mozilla, Safari and most of those little icons that ask us what we want to do then shut down our computers without asking. Fail whale and worse, so it’s time to wrap up, give up and shut down!

Just one more try to access my gMail with the iPhone – works first time.

Should I withdraw all my raging and get back to where we started?

Wonderful new clothing, takes a little getting used to and from time to time we lose some stitches. Get used to it, bespoke is out and it’s sew your own.

What didn’t work before will now, and what you were counting on may collapse. Learn to love it, live with it and enliven it.

Meanwhile those students swinging from the chandeliers don’t look so off-course after all. they will be the bungee learners we should look up to and look after (so they don’t break their necks before they graduate). In the classrooms we’ll be hearing “Watch out, here I come” and we’d better learn that Tarzan yell too or we’ll be left under the trees.

(Here is the explanation for the outage and the reason I could read my mail on the iPhone)

Poodle training sessions are always full of suspense. Our school version of Moodle has been in place for some four years now, from an abandoned desktop converted to Linux in a corner of the server room, via several hosted servers, finally to return to the same server room clad in Starwars armor-plating in a choice of Dell colors (black).

These last few days there’s been a slight sense of urgency, particularly among the teachers who were non-starters a year ago when our bandwidth was so bad it was challenging to open even an email. Now we have a fully funcional service and dozens of brand new laptops (black) ready to be switched on. Let ‘em roll.

As the willing teachers type their class content and boldly strike their Enter keys you can imagine the excitement and apprehension as they await the proof they have followed all the steps and are about to be rewarded with a beautifully formatted page, ready to be pushed to a world of learners.

Freeze.

At that moment, deep inside the memory of Microsoft, in a far-away galaxy, bits and bytes are stirring. A new laptop has just been spotted and the installed version of Windows (XP) hasn’t been switched on since the truckload of computers was delivered, checked, imaged and stored ready for school opening. Now the machine is turned back on and the hills are alive with Windows updates. As many as twenty of them are jostling their way through the processor to rush to the surface in a race to outdo each other and stamp out erroneous code we had all been living with for years.

You’d think the poor teacher would be thankful Microsoft was taking care of his/her machine.

Freeze.

Inevitably the response is – what am I doing wrong?

Answer – trying to work when your operating system is trying to right its wrongs.
Answer – returning from vacation before your computer has done just that.
Answer – opening a box as unpredicable as Pandora.

Solution?

Turn on computer, stand back and take a couple of days extra vacation. The sun is out, the sky is blue, the Rock en Seine Festival is days away just down the street from school. If you go back to your laptop you’re going to say nasty things to it.

Tomorrow sees all our new students arriving at school and we’ll be greeting them and welcoming them to our special learning community. Let’s hope our own human operating systems won’t be interrupted by system messages.

Today the login arrived and there I was looking like the cool inventors on Youtube – except the people I pinged didn’t get the ping. It seems I was really just talking to myself. Still even that is exciting for the first time:

Isn’t this is where all fifth graders aspire to – being both in the White House and on Youtube?  What more could a succesful young journalist dream of? Following my previous posting about student managed news I have been struck by how much of the significant videos posted on Youtube came from young, self-taught people. It’s no surprise that TV viewing has dropped most in the 14-25 year-old age range to ‘only’ 10 hours per week. (DON’T WATCH THIS MOVIE IF YOU LIVE IN FRANCE – DON’T CLICK BELOW etc)

If you are from France and tried to play this Youtube clip you’ll now get a message “This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions” . Click on the picture and you’ll get any number of alternative sites such as “Quick Back 2 School Hair and Outfit”

Ahh America, where elementary school children barely out of the White House can be locked into contracts with big media and wannabe educators get sent to teenage hair sites. Is it time for another High School Musical or should I be looking for home movies that don’t age (or make money for big conglomerates)?

Well this was a blog that originally set out to show total admiration but got slammed by copyright restrictions for my country (which happens to be France). Watch out because the copyright moguls are about to take the USA public school systems to the cleaners.

Pandemic Flu is a virus that is not affected by anti-bacterian gels (though yes you should wash your hands more these days, seriously). Recommended time is as long as it takes to sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ twice over. If anyone is listening in the bathroom this could be considered a public performance and you could owe millions to the guy who found the unclaimed rights and bought them for a song (?) back in the twenties, registered the rights several times over so now the song is gold for the owner until 2030. That’s a long time to go without washing your hands!

Maybe Damon and his agent are onto something and from now on ANYTHING Mr. Obama says will also be subject to copyright restrictions. Perhaps anything our French president says will be subject to approval by his wife’s recording label.

Money talks, direct from the White House – paydom of speech. Boy, do I get upset at small things!

Three days in the Morvan – peace, friends and music. It’s a blessing to have a place to hide away from technology, up to a point. Notice the iPhone  (Tom is adding his profile picture and cell number to my contacts) wish I could do that as fast as they can.